MOVIE REVIEW: Ant-Man And The Wasp : Quantumania

Marvel Studios has just dropped their most boring movie since The Legend of The Ten Rings.

Living real estate and rebel fighters led by a wannabe-Ronda Rousey are not enough to hide the fact that Quantumania features characters that no audience really cares about from the heroes to the villains. Evangeline Lily is unconvincing as Michelle Pfeiffer’s daughter, as they both look like they’ve seen the same plastic surgeon over the years, and Kathryn Newton as Ant-Man’s eventual replacement quickly turns cute to annoying. Jonathan Majors as Kang is comic book accurate, imposing, and brutal in the final battle, but what he and Micheal Douglas’ Hank Pym share in Quantumania is their lack of screen time sacrificed for corny dad jokes by either Paul Rudd (who’s career highlights are also Judd Apatow ‘s) or Cory Stoll as M.O.D.O.K. gets the treatment that Snyder gave to Michael Shannon in the now dead DCEU. The big difference there though being that Zod/Doomsday are deadly, Yellowjacket(if it’s not Hank Pym under the mask)/M.O.D.O.K. just don’t carry that same juice.

The expansion of Scott and Cassie’s father/daughter relationship parallelled by the Van Dyne’s (Janet and Hope, respectfully) is as contrived as the various flashback sequences. So much screen time could have been spent on the war between the residents of the Quantum Realm and Kang’s enforcers, or just Kang posturing in general. Multiple Ant-Men/Giant-Men(with bent rules for stamina and vocal range when Pym Particles are used on females apparently) doesn’t make Ant-Man III any better than the first two. Quantumania is actually the first bad Ant-Man film, with too many heady concepts that get re-explained by nearly every character and a landscape that looks copy/pasted from the board room of that other Disney flop Strange World – just the real-time version. Matter of fact, Quantumania looks an awful lot like the trailers for Strange World, just expanded for the duration of a full film. Between Quantumania and it’s theatrical trailer I don’t want to hear Paul Rudd say “daughter” ever again for the rest of my life. “Cassie” has now become a trigger word. Thanks you, Jeff Loveness.

Why are both The Legend of The Ten Rings and this Ant-Man set in San Francisco? Marvel Studios out here making the Bay look bad in an effort to get audiences to check out Loki Season Two.
I was looking at the movie poster for Shazam Fury of The Gods and at the bottom of it the poster read something like “pick up DC Comics at Comic Book Shops”. I looked at the Quantumania poster a few cases down, and all it said was “Marvel“. With films like this, I’m glad Marvel Studios doesn’t pretend to be related to the superior storytelling of comic books that they have mined soullessly for source material. That’s what all the corny jokes, CGI, and plastic surgery cant cover up about Quantumania, and why Jonathan Majors has been so greatly lauded across media outlets for his role in this movie : Quantumania lacks soul.

Score : 1.5/5